On Tue, May 7, 2013 at 11:25 AM, Jed Rothwell <jedrothw...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Eugen Leitl <eu...@leitl.org> wrote: > > >> > This is often stated, but of course it's nonsense. Who could reject a >> > phenomenon that replaces fossil fuels? That powers a car without >> refueling? >> >> This is precisely my problem with claimed evidence for CF/LENR. >> > > Read history and you will see that many vitally important discoveries were > rejected, sometimes for decades. > None like cold fusion though, unless you go back to Semmelwis, and even that was different. I'm not aware of a small-scale phenomenon like cold fusion, in the last century, in which the basic concept was rejected by the mainstream for decades, that was later vindicated. > Many important reforms were delayed, such as the use of seat belts in > cars. Projects such as the Transcontinental Railroad could not get funding. > History is full of disastrous mistakes and bad judgement, such as the > Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. > I see you've abandoned the transistor and light bulb as analogies, because they work against you. But sure, seat belts and Pearl Harbor. That's the same thing. > > If it's a giant effect, how come it's so conveniently elusive? >> > > It is not elusive. As McKubre says, it is neither small nor fleeting. It > is hard to reproduce, but once an expert succeeds and the effect turns on, > in many cases there is no doubt it is real. > But you wrote: "Why haven’t researchers learned to make the results stand out? After twelve years of painstaking replication attempts, most experiments produce a fraction of a watt of heat, when they work at all. Such low heat is difficult to measure. It leaves room for honest skeptical doubt that the effect is real. " Sounds elusive to me. And even if there are some who have no doubt it is real, when they try to convince referees for granting agencies or prominent journals, they largely fail. So there is doubt that it is real. And it is elusive. Storms called it his reluctant mistress. MIles wrote in 1996: "To our knowledge, no laboratory can provide detailed experimental instructions to another laboratory and guarantee the reproduction of the excess heat effect." McKubre said the same thing in 2008. An article in NewScientist in 2003 quotes a cold fusion researcher who finally threw in the towel: “For close to two years, we tried to create one definitive experiment that produced a result in one lab that you could reproduce in another,” Saalfeld says. “We never could. What China Lake did, NRL couldn't reproduce. What NRL did, San Diego couldn't reproduce. We took very great care to do everything right. We tried and tried, but it never worked.” > > > It was not sloppy. The calorimetry was confirmed by many other > researchers. It was shown to be remarkably accurate and precise. It has > been replicated by ~200 major labs, as shown in Storms' book. > > > First, the book shows no such thing. The table of excess heat experiments has close to 200 entries, but most of the authors or groups representing major labs appear multiple times, probably an average of 3 or so, meaning there are maybe 65 labs represented. (Interestingly, about a third of those groups are not represented after about 1995, suggesting maybe they lost confidence in their results, or they don't think cold fusion is an important topic. Whether it's 200 or 65 is a quibble perhaps, and your point that there are many stands, but this sort of dishonesty is much too typical of your arguments. Second, the excess heat claims say nothing about whether or not the early FP paper was sloppy or not. In fact, none of the results line up quantitatively, so very little can be said about the quality of the measurements based on the number of claims alone. Third, P&F made a pretty basic blunder about the neutron emission, considering they were making a claim about nuclear reactions. That can only be called sloppy, if it was not deliberate deception. > I disagree. Reproducibility is much better than it was. The control > parameters for Pd-D are well understood. > > > What do you base this on? In 1994 McKubre claimed nearly 100% reproducibility, then in 1998 he said he spoke too soon, and reported only 20%. Storms also claimed high reproducibility in 1996, but in 2010 laments "These extraordinary and difficult to create conditions partially explain the frequent failure to replicate when using the electrolytic method." Around 2004 Dardik was claiming 70% reproducibility, but Duncan, who has moved the operation to Missouri, said last year the reproducibility was 20%. Hubler in a 2007 review claimd 1/3 of the experiments worked. The recent claims from NRL reported in Korea, and which you have touted, have a reproducibility of 5%. Nothing I've seen gives any indication of improving reproducibility.
